It's payback time for our rotten year
IT’S time that we all say something nice to Mother Nature.
She’s been miserably mean to us this year, but these days she has been making up with a grand late summer.
Even the misty-morning fog, hanging over the spidery spans of the I-74 bridges, have been sidestepping to sudden sunshine.
We’re a bunch of gripers. We’ve been griping all year about the weather, and now we must atone for our complaints. Our late August days have been perfectly perfect, a week of straight days in the 80s with two solid weeks of low humidity. Ah, such days to kick off our loafers and pull off the T-shirts and get a once-over-lightly.
Only once — Aug. 4, if you can think that far back — it was 92. The air conditioning has been mostly off for weeks, so Quad-Citizens can fling open the windows and sleep with breezes blowing across rumpled beds.
We’re getting a deserved payback in warm blue skies for last winter, which had no mercy. It began early and would not give up until late April. Remember when we struggled through 51.5 inches of snow, about 16 inches above normal? When we weren’t digging out of our driveways, we were cursing the potholes that turned streets into craters of the moon. We shivered, too. The winter’s temp was 2 degrees below normal. Last Jan. 24 and 25, it was 15 below zero. It was the worst winter since ’36 or any that could be miserably remembered.
No wonder we’ve been angry at Mother Nature. On June 12, she dumped buckets of rain on us, just to aggravate our swollen rivers and make life even more miserable for thousands. Then, who can forget July 21, that awful Monday, when 90 mph winds howled and blew much of us to pieces.
So, belated thought it may be, let’s say “thank you” to Mother Nature for these past couple weeks. She’s paying us back for all she did in the past months. Shucks, it didn’t even rain for the fair.
A lefty’s defiance wins!
After Sunday’s column on my tearful battles with a first-grade teacher who tried to turn me from a lefty to a right-hander …
“I, too, am left-handed, and my first-grade teacher was determined to make me write with my right hand,” says the Rev. Bob Hamilton, Davenport. “She had all the other kids in the class tell her if I didn’t pick up pencils and crayons with my right hand. She graded my writing as ‘unsatisfactory’ and marked my report card that I lacked self-control since I refused to become a right-hander.
“When my class was promoted to second grade, this teacher — on the verge of retirement — also was promoted to second grade and I had her two years instead of just one. Those were my two most miserable years in school.
“Yes, I am still left-handed.”
Setting it straight
The column item on a Circa ’21 performer actually breaking a leg just before a performance brings a definition of the old good-luck saying of “break a leg” to a performer before going onstage. Says Steve Trainor, Davenport: “It’s considered bad luck to wish someone good luck on the stage. So, they do it obtrusively by telling them to ‘break a leg.’ That line came from the many curtsies a woman would make at curtain call. The more bows during an elongated applause, the better a performance was considered. As a woman curtsies, she bends (‘breaks’) her leg.”
Let’s hope this settles that bit of stage business!
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.